self-help
In honor of its 75th anniversary the May
Esquire has a big pullout feature called "75 Skills Every Man Should Master." The premise — Magazines! Lists! — is not exactly revolutionary, and the "skills," such as practicing "brand loyalty to at least one product" and "making three different bets at a craps table" are not exactly universally vital, but I'm writing about the feature precisely because it's so classically
Esquire. Esquire is a magazine about "how to be a better man" or some John Wayne shit like that.
Esquire doesn't try and tell its readers they are fine just the way they are.
Esquire likes rules, definites, moral "absolutes" to substitute for the old moral absolutes in which modern society is so woefully deficient.
Glamour would, for whatever reason, never tell its readers they
needed to know how to deliver a eulogy or install a thermostat without asking for help, because they are too busy telling their readers to not feel guilty about being too emotional to deliver the eulogy without breaking down, or ask a dude for help installing the thermostat. Thank the nonexistent moral authorities that
I don't get paid
Glamour rates to write this stuff, right?
More »
j-bel encyclical
Under normal circumstances I probably would not deign to ask a favor of his Holiness the Pontiff on his trip to our shores, but I was recently called to action by the
news of the slow extinction of a venerable Catholic tradition that I believe to be a matter of universal concern. I know you to be a man of tradition, Pope Benedict XVI, so perhaps you can take some sort of action to preserve the long-observed ritual "the rolling up of the kilt." (It is like the "laying on of the hands" of sluts.) The rolling up of the Catholic school uniform kilt is perhaps my favorite of all Roman Catholic rituals, and to anyone who does not understand the comfort and salvation from my bitterness etc. that my continued association with the Catholic Church affords: I invite you to view this great faith through its lens.
More »
crappy hour
Barack Obama thinks the new Pope is hustling the
opiate of the masses. But it's the opiate that kept him off his cokehead ways so it's okay! Hillary thinks the
potential for life begins at conception, and that Obama is an
elitist. Is it possible that the second coming of the Messiah is
also the reincarnation of
Karl Marx? Is it possible that some countries can
only subsist on dirt and opiates for so long? Are we talking about Marx when we should be talking about
Malthus and stockpiling guns? Barack Obama seems to think so, and guess what? We agree. In Jezebel's deepest spiritual discussion since
I wrote about how being a Libra made me believe in God, the inimitable
Megan and I discuss the papacy, fave hymns, and how cool it would be if Jesus came back as a Palestinian stand-up comedian.
More »
the book of jezebel
An Israeli religious scholar and professor of cognitive psychology is
advancing the thesis that the Ten Commandments, the moral foundation of the religious faith that have guided billions and billions of people for thousands of years, were revealed that fateful night on Mt. Sinai
because Moses was high. On what? (Wouldn't it have been awesome if it were Ecstasy? wouldn't that make for a great sequel to those hilarious "Religions of the World" T-shirts? Or better yet, one of those signs in bar bathrooms with like the "Zen guide to life" or whatever? I never remember the valuable things I learn from the posters in bar bathrooms. Except the thing about how you "forget 80% of what you learn every day." Anyway.) Anyway! Sooooo, Moses was high. The scholar, Benny Shanon, seems to think he experienced something like his own experiences on ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic brew indigenous to the Amazon beloved by such luminaries as Johnson & Johnson heiress
Libet Johnson.
More »
loose morality
What are morals? And why does generation after generation insist on infusing certain behaviors, whether they be eating pork or eating meat, cloning cows or cloning zygotes, driving pickups or buying Barbies at Wal-Mart, drinking or smoking, with the radioactive taint that is MORALITY? Why do the universal biological instincts we call "conscience" impel toddlers to offer you their drool-stained teddy bears when they see you cry, and yet adults, in the name of the universal moral order their consciences supposedly constructed, see fit to publicly flog other adults who allow said children to name their teddy bears "Mohammed"? What was up with
Will Smith telling that newspaper he didn't think Hitler thought of himself as a terrible guy? And why the fuck are people so quick to misinterpret every goddamn thing someone says, as if they've been standing in the shadows for years,
waiting for that deep-rooted innermost hatefulness to reveal itself? Why does righteousness so easily slide into immorality? And why does every experiment testing the universality of "morals" involve runaway tolleys? Is what we call "morality" just a
nother example of of evolutionary biology, which is the new "socialization"? Can we blame Darwin for Bratz dolls, AND our moral opposition to the existence of Bratz dolls in our Wal-Mart stores?
More »
the book of jezebel
I believe in God. Why? I always figured it was because I was a Libra, and Libras crave affirmation, but they also crave balance, so some larger force needs to step in and say "you don't actually need every single
one of those people to like you." What, you don't believe in astrology? That's okay, some signs are into astrology, and others aren't, and I've never met a Libra (or a Scorpio, for that matter) who didn't occasionally emit some idiotic babble about Mercury being in retrograde or Saturn returning, which sort of backwards proves the stuff is for real, albeit maybe in that way the placebo effect is real, and yeah that's the sound of
Christopher Hitchens beating off because he can't hate-fuck me right now.
More »
Jezebel
